A Family for Christmas (17 page)

The idea that struck her then was like a gift from God—so simple, yet ingenious.

“Brock, you and I have both had jobs to do ever since Joy showed up in that manger.”

“And your point is?” he asked when she didn't make one.

“My point is we both ultimately want the same thing for Joy—a safe home where she is loved.”

Brock lifted an eyebrow, being generous by not pointing out that his goal also was to see the baby's mother behind bars.

“Well, the key to meeting our mutual goal is to find Joy's mother. Even if she wants to begin the Termination of Parental Rights process, we need to locate her.”

He looked at her as if she was daft and spoke to her the way he would a child. “That's why I'm following up on this lead. To find the mother.”

“I know you're doing your best, Brock. But I have an idea to make the search even better. Since we both need to find Joy's mom, I suggest that we combine our efforts.”

“What are you saying?”

“I want us to team up, so we can find Joy's mother together.”

B
rock wondered if there were any other languages he could have said “Absolutely not” in and if any of them would have made a difference to Allison once she had her mind made up that he needed her help in this investigation. He guessed there were no others, at least none that would have changed her mind.

Even now as he stood in the abandoned hotel room with its threadbare sheets and scent of a recent insecticide spraying, he could still see her determination as clearly as when she'd announced her crazy idea of joining him. He'd fought a valiant fight at first, speaking of regulations and lawsuits and everything else he could pull from his debate arsenal. But then she'd turned her miserable expression on him, telling him she couldn't go back to that cold, empty house. He hadn't stood a chance.

“Joy and her mom probably stayed here.”

Allison said the words without any judgment in her voice, but they condemned him anyway. She'd been
right that first night when she'd reminded him they didn't know how desperate the mother's situation was. Pretty desperate, as far as he could tell.

“Not a four-star hotel, anyway.”

“Not even one star,” she concluded.

When Allison stepped to the bureau and started opening the drawers that swayed sideways from their broken tracks, Brock was glad he'd done at least one thing right tonight. He doubted, though, that having the forethought to make her wear latex gloves to eliminate her fingerprints would lessen his colossal mistake of letting her come.

“She didn't leave any clothes behind, for her or the baby,” she said as she closed the second drawer.

“She probably didn't have much.”

His comment must have surprised her as much as it had him because she turned and met his gaze too long, until he looked away. What had she thought before, that he didn't have a heart? She just didn't understand. He didn't have the luxury of pitying the suspect in his investigation, of wondering if the woman might have deserted her child to protect her from living this life.

Remember that I love you.
The mother's words on that note troubled him just as they had when they'd first found it. If that mother had wanted better for her child, could it mean that just possibly, his own mother had left for
his
benefit? No, he would never believe that. Madeline didn't have an unselfish bone in her body. He'd been a burden she'd unloaded without ever looking back.

For several seconds he stared at the outdated and
stained car seat in the corner where a casualty of extermination efforts also lay, its six legs up in the air. Joy's mother might have been trying to do that right thing, but the way she'd gone about it was a crime. His job was to enforce the laws, not to weigh in with his opinion on whether or not they were properly merciful. No matter how much they wished it otherwise, few people were ever on the receiving end of mercy.

Allison, who had slipped into the tiny bathroom a few minutes before, popped her head out. “Brock, do you know if the maid actually cleaned the room or just opened it up to clean it and found the car seat?”

He lifted his own gloved hand from where he was tracing a finger though a trail of dust likely far older than Joy. “The manager said she started to clean but stopped when she found the car seat. Why do you ask?”

“Come look at this.”

The mildew-filled scent caught him as he stepped to the bathroom doorway. Black lines of it covered the grout on sections of crumbling tile.

She pointed to the trash basket. “Most people leave some sort of waste behind—tissues, cotton balls, something. She had a baby in this room, and yet there aren't any soiled diapers.”

“So she might have emptied her own trash. Or the maid might have done it.”

“Either way, we don't have a lot to go on. You can learn a lot about a person by the things she throws away.”

Brock couldn't help grinning. “Been watching a lot of crime investigation shows lately?”

She shrugged and smiled back. “They're interesting.”

“We don't even know how long she's been gone.” Even he could hear the frustration in his voice. “The desk clerk couldn't remember for sure which day he'd heard the crying. And if the guest was our suspect, she might have cruised out of here right after she dropped off the baby. If so, she'd be long gone by now.”

“Or maybe not,” she said softly, but her wary expression showed she wasn't holding out much hope.

Because the room suddenly felt too quiet, too close, both returned to their individual observations. He had to give Joy's mom credit. She'd been neat, and she hadn't left anything behind that wouldn't require a specially trained crime scene investigator to find it.

For a long time, Brock and Allison worked companionably in the small space, neither breaking the silence with unnecessary words. Whether it was a mistake or not to have done it, he was glad he'd brought her along to keep him company today. It
was
Christmas, after all. He didn't want to be alone, either, as he searched for clues.

Not that they were really accomplishing anything by being here or could even know for sure that Joy had been in that car seat, though his gut told him that the baby from this room and the child in the manger were one in the same. Did Allison realize like he did that they were no closer to locating Baby Doe's mother than they were the moment they realized something was fishy about those swaddling clothes?

“You haven't failed her, you know.” He wished
he could have stopped them, but the words seemed just to fall from his lips of their own accord.

Allison jerked her head and turned back to him, her eyes too shiny. “I just thought—”

“That she would come back?” Another day he might have said, “I told you so.” Any woman who'd managed to vanish like that wouldn't reappear and call it all a big misunderstanding. He'd known that truth, but still Allison had kept hoping. Brock hated knowing that she wouldn't believe anymore. He wished he could make it right for her, restore her faith.

And suddenly he was saying ridiculous things for no other reason than that he had to try. For her sake. “We still have a few hours until the hearing. I doubt we're going to find anything else here. Let's go back to the department and look over the case file again. Maybe there's something we've missed.”

Because she was nodding enthusiastically, he kept on going, each word feeling like more of a lie than the last. But this was worse than just fooling her with words she wanted to believe. He was fooling himself, as well. He wanted to believe it, too.

“We'll check with the hospitals again. Maybe they've found a patient's record that they overlooked before. We'll check with state police for anyone picked up for hitchhiking from the area.”

Allison rushed over to the door, speaking over her shoulder as she went. “Somebody must have seen her. We just haven't asked the right people yet.”

No, they hadn't asked the right people. But he and the other deputies had canvassed the town, asking
everyone they could think of—gas station attendants, truck drivers, convenience store clerks—if they'd seen anyone out of the ordinary. Someone who might meet the general description of the woman witnesses saw the night of the live nativity.

The quiet descended again as Allison waited at the door and Brock took one last look around the hotel room.

“Brock, tell me about when your parents deserted you.”

His sharp intake of breath stung his lungs, but he forced himself to at least appear relaxed. “They didn't desert me. Roy and Clara Chandler, both of them, were with me every minute I'd let them, until the days they died.”

“You know what I mean. Tell me about Madeline and…I don't think you said his name.”

Brock's heart squeezed, and not just because Allison had remembered his birth mother's name. He'd carried all of this pain inside an awfully long time. It was heavy. He didn't want to carry it anymore.

“I don't even
know
his name, but Madeline Jeffries, I won't forget that. She liked me to call her Madeline in public. Not Mom. Not Mommy. Those words put a dent in her social life.”

“I'm so sorry—”

But he waved a hand to interrupt her. He'd started telling this in the same way a freight train started moving—slowly, reluctantly. Now there didn't seem to be anything he could do to stop it all from rolling forward, even if he was acting both the role of tiny
boy balancing on the railroad tracks and the engineer trying desperately to avoid a catastrophe.

“We used to play this game where I pretended in front of her
friends
that I was her neighbor's kid, and she was only watching me. If I pretended well and went right to bed, I'd get candy in the morning.”

“But you loved her.”

Because she didn't say it as a question, he didn't bother trying to deny it. “When it was just the two of us at home, she'd let me curl her long hair around my fingers. She even let me call her Mommy then.”

“So what happened?”

“One day, she dropped me off at the day-care center, kissed me goodbye and never came back.”

Though he hadn't been watching her until then, Brock looked up, expecting to see pity in her eyes. Instead, she approached him slowly and took his hand in hers. Her eyes glistened with tears, and a few spilled over.

Brock had to force himself to remain still when his instinct was to gather her into his arms, comforting her and, for once, allowing another human to console him. He tried to chuckle as he gently pulled his hand away, but it came out sounding strange to his ears.

“Come on, it's not a sad story. I couldn't have had better parents than Roy and Clara. He coached soccer. She taught my Sunday school class.”

Instead of commenting on his quick segue from his scars, she smiled. “I'm so glad they were there for you.”

“They taught me about God's love and lived their entire lives being living examples of it.”

Allison opened her mouth, and then she snapped it shut. He could guess what she was about to ask.

“Oh, sorry about my comments the other night. The ones about God. As you can tell, the whole abandonment issue hits close to home.”

“I understand.”

Brock sensed that she did understand, more than just the excuse for his verbal attacks. As he followed her to the door and reached around her to open it, he hoped she would also understand that he couldn't dwell on his past now, not if they were going to find the missing clue that would lead them to Joy's mother.

The suspect, though, had disappeared into thin air. They were attempting to pluck her back out of that air. The clock was ticking until the detention hearing. For Allison—and especially for Joy—he had to try.

 

In the light of day, the stable just looked like a rustic lean-to with a bunch of hay bales and a wooden trough in it. But as Allison drew in a lungful of the crisp air that announced Indiana's white Christmas would be arriving a day or so too late, she could envision it all. David fidgeting with his Joseph hat. Her pillow belly falling out. The choir guys in their Wise Men's robes.

Because she wanted to keep her gaze from returning again and again to the manger bed, she concentrated on the hay scent that wafted in her nostrils. The memory of the pony's neigh, so out of place and yet not, tickled her ears. She heard the choir…heard the cry.

And Brock was there, appearing like a bright light out of the darkened crowd.

He'd done the same thing in her life, coming so quickly into focus while the rest of her life before him remained a blur. As terrifying as not knowing was, she didn't want the blur back for anything in the world.

“Why do you think she did it?”

She jerked her head to look at Brock as he again scanned the area where they'd found the diaper bag and the Baby Jesus doll, as if the scene would somehow speak to him and provide the answers that had eluded them.

“You mean why she abandoned the baby?”

“Yeah, in your professional opinion.”

She slowly shook her head. “I don't know. There can be all kinds of extenuating circumstances, plenty of stress factors. If she would only come forward, we could look at all of the stressors affecting her.”

“Some examples?”

“She might have four other kids at home and can't afford to feed another. This child might have been the product of an adulterous affair, and she couldn't bring her home. There might be physical abuse in the home. She could be a drug addict or a teen mom or be mentally ill.” Allison crossed to the manger, her hand automatically brushing the hay in it. “Enough?”

“So it could have been almost anything?”

She nodded as she approached the hay bale where he stood. “It doesn't mean she doesn't love her child. And, Brock—” she paused until he met her gaze
“—just because your mom left doesn't mean she didn't love you, either.”

“But not enough, right?”

“Maybe more than you know. Maybe she wanted to give you the chance for a better life.”

 

Allison unlocked the front door, her hand that held the key feeling as heavy as her heart. No, nothing could compare to her heart.

“You sure you're going to be okay?” Brock asked.

“Yeah, I'm just tired.” She stepped inside the door, slipped off her coat and hung it on the coat tree.

She wondered why she bothered lying when the man standing behind her in her entry so obviously didn't believe her. He'd asked how she was three times since he'd led her to his car, suggesting that she leave hers downtown and pick it up in the morning.

She wasn't all right. How could she be? The hearing had come and gone. She'd submitted the 311 investigative report with more than enough factors to substantiate child neglect: abandonment, lack of supervision and lack of food, shelter and clothing.